The recent scandals involving Wikileaks releasing classified documents have brought to light a significant problem. Often classified documents are leaked by individuals who had legitimate access to them. In fact security experts repeatedly warn organizations that their biggest risk are internal employees.
It is critical that government agencies, corporate entities and the like, be able to track the source of leaks. Current methods, such as described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,314,425, focus on controlling who may access a document. Other inventions, such as the Microsoft Image Embedding or watermarking are concerned with copyright issues. None of these track the document each time it moves from computer to computer, user to user. Once a person has the document there is nothing to track how they distribute, copy, or alter that document.
In an effort to combat copyright infringement, many groups have turned to placing watermarks on documents. Many approaches to watermarking documents have been attempted. However, watermarks are easy to remove from a digital document. Also a watermark won't enable the document's movements to be tracked. It will simply identify the original copyright owner of the document.
What is needed, is an improved system and method for tracking documents.